I wrote the original piece over five years ago, pre-9/11 and after my first visit to the Museum of Tolerance. I cleaned it up and am reposting it here, a day after my second visit:
I finally had the chance to go to the Museum of Tolerance today. My expectations were perhaps too high–it didn’t match up to the profound influences on my life, such as the Atomic Bomb Museum in Nagasaki, Schindler’s List and the book Treblinka. I did come away pensive about the holocaust and the pain and sorrow that some people are capable of inflicting on their neighbors.
One of the themes in the Holocaust exhibit was that common, everyday people were responsible for the mistreatment and murder of millions of jews. Even when soldiers were told that they could volunteer not to participate in the execution of Jewish women, children and elders, the most still chose to point their rifles at these helpless innocents and pull the triggers.
The victims of this unfathomable tragedy were also common, everyday people–bakers and bankers, soldiers and scientists, teachers and tailors, school children and grandmothers. The lives of eleven million of German neighbors–people who deserved to read the newspaper over a cup of coffee each morning, to laugh with friends and family over a Sunday afternoon meal, to tuck their children in at night with a story, a prayer and a kiss–all of these lives were cut short. Some wasted away, victims of starvation and disease in the overcrowded Warsaw ghetto, others killed by bullets to their heads while standing in cold ditches dug with their own hands, and many more choked on poison gas as they stood naked clinging to each other in terror in large concrete “showers”.
Not all subjects of the Nazi regime turned a blind eye to this attempted genocide. Polish farmers sheltered their Jewish friends in their barns, feeding and clothing them. A Muslim in Yugoslavia hid his Jewish boss in his home at the risk of his own life. Catholic nuns in Warsaw took the little sons and daughters of Jewish families and distributed among their orphanages.
The liberators, those who brought down the Nazi slaughterhouses, were also common, everyday people–mostly Americans and subjects of the British crown who were college students, truck drivers, teachers, mechanics, sons and husbands and fathers. Many of these never went home again.
I think a lot about how I and my friends and neighbors–ordinary, everyday people, all of us–would react in similar circumstances. Things seem all right now, but what if we were to suffer economic catastrophe again, and a fascist regime took advantage of the insecurity and rose to power on the rhetoric of hatred?
This is why I feel that we have to be on guard constantly, lest we become perpetrators or victims of such inhuman crimes.
